Archive for September, 2010

Now that the “Great Recession” is officially over (Really? Or so they tell us), the regime kicked off their “Summer of Wreckovery” tour to tell us how they saved the economy. Our dear comrade leader, Vice Premier Joe “Smartass” Biden and other regime apparatchiks, with assistance from the state-run media propaganda machine, have spent copious amounts of hot air congratulating themselves for putting the economy back on track. Jeez, I feel better already – don’t you?

One of the regime’s touted accomplishments is that they have created 200,000 “green” jobs – one of our dear comrade leader’s campaign promises to “transform” America. Hmmm. Given that as recent as March of this year the regime couldn’t define a “green job,” (previous post here) one wonders how all of a sudden, they can claim that they’ve created 200,000 of them.

Buried deep inside a federal newsletter on March 16 was something called a “notice of solicitation of comments” from the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor.

“BLS is responsible for developing and implementing the collection of new data on green jobs,” said the note in the Federal Register, which is widely read by government bureaucrats and almost never seen by the general public. But the notice said there is “no widely accepted standard definition of ‘green jobs.’” To help find that definition, the Labor Department asked that readers send in suggestions.

According to this story (from the Washington Examiner), the regime has apparently been able to define what a green job actually is. Just ignore the details, though.

For months, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley has been pushing the administration to substantiate its claims of having created nearly 200,000 green jobs. More fundamentally, Grassley has asked Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to state clearly what a green job is. So far, he hasn’t gotten an answer.

Now, Grassley has learned that, in lieu of a settling on a straightforward definition of a green job, the administration has adopted an extraordinarily broad description of such jobs that could include not only financial advisers, wholesale buyers, and reporters, but also public relations specialists, marketing managers, and many more occupations that have nothing to do with protecting the environment.

If federal money has created any of those jobs, then the administration can claim to have created a green job.

See how easy that was? They’re all green jobs! SHEESH!

For the administration, Grassley’s discovery is just the latest in a long line of embarrassments on the green jobs front. First there was the controversy surrounding departed green jobs czar Van Jones. Then there was widespread skepticism about the nearly 200,000 such jobs the administration claims to have created. And then there was the unhappiness on Capitol Hill over reports that of $2.1 billion the government has granted for renewable energy jobs, like assembling wind turbines, about 80 percent has gone to foreign companies. The stimulus has created some actual green jobs, but they’re in China.

The promotion of green jobs with stimulus money — a marriage of the Obama administration’s environmental and economic agendas — has been a top priority for the White House since Day One. It still is. Just last month, Vice President Biden traveled to New Hampshire to tout “good-paying jobs, green jobs, jobs that can’t be exported.”

It sounds good. But if you look a little closer into the administration’s claims, you’ll find they literally don’t know what they’re talking about.

Indeed. But what do you expect? We have a regime, headed by a marxist community organizer who has called the private sector “the enemy,” comprised largely (92%) of academics and career bureaucrats with virtually no private sector experience. Thinkers – not doers.

The TSA exemplifies the true meaning of government FAIL. (previous posts here, here, and here) Many of the individual employees are at least trying to do a good job. It is the agency itself with its bad policies, mismanagement, and mindless bureaucracy that suffers from government-induced rectal-cranial inversion. The question that should be asked is, “Are we safer with the TSA in charge of airport security?”

According to this story (from the AP), at least 10,000 TSA employees are about to get Secret clearance. Hey, I feel safer already – Ugh.

The new head of the Transportation Security Administration say he’s giving 10,000 of the agency’s employees access to secret intelligence information to better enable them to detect threats and stop terrorists.

John Pistole (PIH’-stohl) told an aviation luncheon that he views TSA as a counterterrorism agency. He said his goal is to get the latest intelligence to all employees who have what he called an “action need” to “inform their judgment and decision-making.”

Pistole is a former deputy FBI director who was confirmed by the Senate as TSA administrator in June. He said he begins each day with an intelligence briefing.

I have met many soldiers in my travels. These are some of the finest folks you’ll ever encounter. While I have sometimes disagreed with why and how the US conducts war, the bottom line is that these folks are putting their lives on the line for our country – and our freedom. That is the ultimate dedication and commitment to your country. Nothing epitomizes this commitment and dedication more than the story of Capt. Dan Luckett – one of America’s finest.

Capt. Dan Luckett

When a bomb exploded under Dan Luckett’s Army Humvee in Iraq two years ago — blowing off one of his legs and part of his foot — the first thing he thought was: “That’s it. You’re done. No more Army for you.”

But two years later, the 27-year-old Norcross, Georgia, native is back on duty — a double-amputee fighting on the front lines of America’s Afghan surge in one of the most dangerous parts of this volatile country.

Luckett’s remarkable recovery can be attributed in part to dogged self-determination. But technological advances have been crucial: Artificial limbs today are so effective, some war-wounded like Luckett are not only able to do intensive sports like snow skiing, they can return to active duty as fully operational soldiers. The Pentagon says 41 American amputee veterans are now serving in combat zones worldwide.

Capt. Brant Auge, Luckett’s 30-year-old company commander, said Luckett was as capable as every soldier in his company, and treated no different.

“He’s a soldier who just happens to be missing a leg,” said Auge, who is from Ocean Springs, Mississippi. “He tries to play it down as much as possible, he doesn’t like to bring a lot of attention to it.”

The next time you hear someone bad mouth the military, tell them about Capt. Dan Luckett – one of America’s finest.

The bear in this storymust have been a pussy. I’ll bet all his friends are rolling around the forest floor laughing their asses off. LOL!!

Police say a Montana woman used an unlikely weapon to fend off a charging bear — a zucchini.

Missoula County Sheriff’s Lt. Rich Maricelli says a 200-pound black bear attacked the woman’s 12-year-old collie just after midnight Wednesday on the back porch of her home about 15 miles west of Missoula.

When the woman, whom police did not name, screamed to draw the bear’s attention, it charged her and swiped at her leg.

Maricelli says the woman jumped back into the doorway and reached for the nearest object on her kitchen counter — a 12-inch zucchini from her garden.

The woman flung the vegetable at the bear, striking it on top of the head and causing it to flee.

Maricelli says the woman did not need medical attention. Wildlife officials were trying to locate the bear on Thursday.

Last week senator John “Skipper” Kerry claimed that the problems facing democrats are the result of an uninformed electorate (story here).

“We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening,” Kerry told reporters after touring the Boston Medical Center yesterday.

In other words, you voters are too stupid to understand what’s going on. What this exquisitely dense statement perfectly demonstrates is the unrelenting and galling arrogance of the political ruling class. Yeah, that message will really work there, Skip.

These douchebags are facing a rude awakening in November. They are about to pay the price for their arrogance. This post (from my favorite commentator, Doctor Zero) hits the nail squarely on the head. Your (democrats & republicans) problem, Skipper, is that we are paying attention and we’re pissed off.

I’m here to assure Senator Kerry that we understand the situation perfectly well. Barney Frank’s role in causing the subprime mortgage crisis, for example, is perfectly clear. He lied extravagantly to protect Fannie Mae from oversight, both for ideological reasons, and for the financial benefit of his boyfriend Herb Moses, a Fannie Mae executive. The financial system of the entire planet nearly collapsed as a result. Barney Frank should have been removed from office before the first bank bailout, and not allowed anywhere near a government office, ever again. He should have spent the last two years answering subpoenas and facing charges, not slobbering over all the new money he wants his Party to seize from honest Americans. The same goes for anyone in either party who knowingly participated in the Fannie Mae scam. A responsible government that took the public trust seriously would have demanded nothing less. We’ve heard a lot about bad behavior in the private sector during the mortgage crisis, and there was indeed plenty to say. We haven’t a word about the responsibility of politicians, or seen any of them formally brought to account.

The Tea Party is a large and growing movement that rejects the premise that a morally and intellectually superior government should be given endlessly expanding power over every aspect of our lives. We reject a media-approved narrative that holds the State blameless for its misdeeds, or gives it unlimited credit for its good intentions. We are competent and compassionate enough to manage our own lives, and address our problems through willing cooperation with our neighbors.

We don’t blame ourselves for the nation’s problems, Senator Kerry. We blame you. We’re not just looking at your Party, either… or have you not been paying attention to the primaries? We can see how much control the State has asserted over our lives through impenetrable layers of regulation, which even legislators admit they neither read nor understand. We’re not just laughing off Nancy Pelosi’s comment that we had to pass ObamaCare to learn what was in it. The Democrats demand we give them vast amounts of power without specifying what they plan to do with it, establishing any means to judge their success, or defining any limit to future expansion of the precedents they set today. They demand our faith, along with the resulting surrender of faith in ourselves. We reject those demands.

For decades most Americans have not paid attention to the emanations from Washington while the political class has grown the federal government leviathan and inserted themselves into virtually every aspect of our daily lives. Well, we’re paying attention now – because the very survival of our Republic is at stake.

Democrat consultant Phil Johnson defended Kerry by saying, “He’s just making the point that people have real lives to lead and most people are not spending a lot of time worrying about politics, particularly in a tough economy.” That’s exactly the point, Mr. Johnson. People have to worry about politics now. They can’t just “lead their lives.” They are about to feel the weight of a law that will force them to purchase health insurance. Many of them have lost their jobs to the approaching rumble of that law. Others have watched the value of their property and investments evaporate due to the mistakes, or deliberate malpractice, of the political class. If Obama gets his cap-and-trade legislation, a sizable number of Americans will find themselves working in industries which have ceased to make economic sense, because of skyrocketing energy prices.

The stated objective of the Obama Administration was “transforming” the American people. Well, transformation is an aggressive act, carried out through compulsive force. We resist, and we will prevail.

The next time someone complains that the average citizen can’t do anything to change “the system,” point them to this article (from FOX News). A fledgling citizen’s watchdog group has uncovered massive voter fraud in Houston.

When Catherine Engelbrecht and her friends sat down and started talking politics several years ago, they soon agreed that talking wasn’t enough. They wanted to do more. So when the 2008 election came around, “about 50” of her friends volunteered to work at Houston’s polling places.

“What we saw shocked us,” she said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”

Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere.

“It was a true Tea Party moment,” she remembers.

Like most voter watchdog groups, she said, her group started small. They decided to investigate voting fraud in general, not just at the polling places, and at first they weren’t even sure what to look for — and where to look for it.

“The first thing we started to do was look at houses with more than six voters in them” Engelbrecht said, because those houses were the most likely to have fraudulent registrations attached to them. “Most voting districts had 1,800 if they were Republican and 2,400 of these houses if they were Democratic . . .

“But we came across one with 24,000, and that was where we started looking.”

So far their efforts have been concentrated on Harris County, second largest in the country with 1.9M voters in 886 precincts.

With the help of additional volunteers and 30 donated computers, the group’s efforts have finally paid off.

Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who also works for the Service Employees International Union. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid.

Among the group’s findings:

Vacant lots had several voters registered on them

An eight-bed halfway house had more than 40 voters registered at its address

A woman who registered six times in the same day

Registrations of non-citizens

So many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability

1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures.

Harris County officials are finally starting to wake up to this massive fraud – which is a nice way of saying that they’ve been shocked into action.

“The integrity of the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas, appears to be under an organized and systematic attack by the group operating under the name Houston Votes,” the Harris voter registrar, Leo Vasquez, charged as he passed on the documentation to the district attorney. A spokesman for the DA’s office declined to discuss the case. And a spokesman for Vasquez said that the DA has asked them to refrain from commenting on the case.

The outcome of the efforts grew in importance the day after Vasquez made his announcement. On the morning of Aug. 27, a three-alarm fire destroyed almost all of Harris County’s voting machines, throwing the upcoming Nov. 2 election into turmoil. While the cause wasn’t determined, the $40 million blaze, according to press reports, means election officials will be focused on creating a whole new voting system in six weeks. Just how they do it will determine how vulnerable the process becomes.

This is the kind of citizen action that the TEA Party inspires. It demonstrates that the average citizen can do something to change the system.